Dr. Abdul El-Sayed says he saw it coming.

“When you launch a campaign and you’re trying to get money out of politics,” he told The Metro, “that invites record amounts of spending against you.”

More than $60 million in outside money went into last week’s Michigan Senate primary, most of it aimed at stopping him. The largest single source was AIPAC, whose super PAC spent about $30 million backing U.S. Rep. Haley Stevens — the most the pro-Israel group has ever put into a congressional primary.

El-Sayed won by fewer than 15,000 votes.

He ran health departments in Detroit and Wayne County, and he now faces Republican Mike Rogers for a seat that could decide control of the Senate. If he wins, he would be the first Muslim to serve there.

He sat down with The Metro’s Robyn Vincent — in the same studio where he announced his run in April of last year.

The money that defined the race

El Sayed came back to the spending repeatedly, including when asked why he lost Detroit. “Ask yourself, if there was no outside spending in this campaign, where do we think votes would have gone?”

He won’t stop saying genocide

Did calling the war in Gaza a genocide drown out his message on health care? He said it isn’t a trade he’ll make: “The job’s not worth it. The work is worth it.”

To Jewish voters who hear his criticism of Israel as criticism of them: “Judaism and the Jewish people are a light unto the world. But Judaism and the Jewish people are different than AIPAC and the Israeli government.”

Black Democrats and the ‘uncommitted’ vote

Many Black Democrats in Michigan blame the 2024 “uncommitted” protest vote, which El-Sayed backed, for costing Kamala Harris the state. Keith Williams, who chairs the state party’s Black Caucus, endorsed Stevens and said El-Sayed was with uncommitted only when it suited him.

“Convenience would have been to say nothing and stay quiet,” El-Sayed said. He noted that Harris endorsed him Friday. “I don’t think she thinks I’m the reason that she lost.”

On mistrust between Black and Arab Detroit, he said Arab and Muslim Michiganders can’t object to anti-Arab racism while tolerating racism toward Black Detroiters. “Standing up against racism is about principle. It’s not about tribalism.”

Data centers and health care

El-Sayed said what he’d write into federal law on data centers, after campaigning against the Oracle and OpenAI project in Saline Township: protections for local water, no utility rate increases, guaranteed union jobs, and money held in escrow before construction begins.

On Medicare for All, he acknowledged a freshman senator can’t deliver it alone. “You can’t get it all in one shot. But politics, as all of us know, doesn’t just move linearly.”

The Metro has invited Republican candidate Mike Rogers on the program several times and has not heard back.

Hear the full conversation using the media player above.

Listen to The Metro weekdays from 10 a.m. to noon ET on 101.9 FM and streaming on-demand. Never miss an episode — subscribe to The Metro on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, YouTube, or NPR, or wherever you get your podcasts. Have thoughts? Email the show at metro@wdet.org.

More stories from The Metro

The Michigan Democratic Senate Primary is heating up a bit. Polls largely show the trio of Dr. Abdul El-Sayed, Congresswoman Haley Stevens, and State Senator Mallory McMorrow all within the margin of error of each other.

Stevens and McMorrow have been trading off the lead.

The race has simmered with the candidates not really taking shots at each other. That’s now changed.

Yesterday, El-Sayed rallied at the University of Michigan and Michigan State with left-wing influencer Hasan Piker.

Piker’s livestreams – and political commentary – have drawn over three million followers on Twitch.

In 2024, Piker was invited to the Democratic National Convention in Chicago, but was kicked out over his criticism of Democrats and candidate Kamala Harris – for their failure to stop or criticize Israel’s genocide in Gaza.

The 34-year-old Piker has made some controversial statements and his inclusion by the progressive El-Sayed has drawn sharp criticism by centrist Democrats.

When the campaign stops were announced, McMorrow was quick to compare Piker to Nick Fuentes—a far-right white supremacist holocaust denier. Stevens and current Michigan U.S. Senator Elissa Slotkin also criticized the move.

Detroit-based reporter Tom Perkins looked at the controversy for The Guardian.

He tells WDET’s Russ McNamara that this fight is indicative of an internal struggle within the Democratic Party.

A party divided

Tom Perkins: I think this is really part of the ongoing civil war between the sort of Hillary Clinton wing of the party and the more progressive Bernie Sanders / AOC (Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez) / Zohran Mamdani wing of the party.

You have El-Sayed and Piker, who are very progressive, and Piker has campaigned or interviewed AOC, Sanders, Zohran Mamdani, etc. And while McMorrow is a little bit younger and more progressive than somebody like Hillary Clinton, a lot of her surrogates, her aides, etc., come from that camp. And so that’s sort of the broader dynamic here and worth keeping in mind.

Accusations of anti-semitism

TP: Piker has been highly critical of Israel. He’s criticized it over its genocide, its rampaging through the Middle East, its war crimes, its atrocities, and he speaks about it in very strong terms. So that’s that alone has drawn some criticism, but he’s also said some pretty controversial things.

[Piker] said Hamas is lesser of the two evils with the Israeli government. Hamas is 1000 times better than the Israeli government. And he said this in the context of looking at who causes more death in the Middle East. And while it’s a controversial statement, people have said, “Oh, well, that’s antisemitic.” But he’s defended himself and said, “No, that’s a criticism of the Israeli government. That’s not a criticism of all Jewish people.”

[Piker] called a sect of Orthodox Jews in Israel who are ethno-supremacists, “inbred.” And that ignited a huge controversy, and that’s been used against him. People have said, “Oh, well, he called all Jews inbred.” He’s, defended that, and said, “No, I use that term to describe Nazis. I use that term to describe ethno-supremacists and racial supremacists of all kinds.”

When I talked with him about it, he said, “Look, there’s a super cut out there of an hour long of me calling different groups inbred, and it has nothing to do with with Jewish people or Jews. It’s just a term that I use to describe supremacists.”

Arab American views

Russ McNamara: What do Arab American leaders say here in Michigan?

TP: For my story, I spoke with seven local and national Arab American and Lebanese American leaders. They all said some variation of the same thing, which is that these attacks on El-Sayed and Piker show that the establishment Democrats are making the same moral and strategic blunders that they made in 2024 that led to Dems electoral demise in Michigan and nationally.

They say this is an attempt to censor criticism of Israel, and they say that it shows the anti-Arab bias that imbues the political establishment. McMorrow in her criticism of El-Sayed and Piker said, “Well, you know, Piker shouldn’t be here, because this happened in the wake of the Temple Israel Synagogue attacks,” which she said that Jewish people are suffering from that. Which is true that Jewish people are suffering from that, and that should be acknowledged, but she doesn’t acknowledge the suffering of the 120,000 Lebanese American people in Michigan.

Their families are from southern Lebanon. Israel has invaded Lebanon, virtually every one of these 120,000 people, either have a family member, a loved one, a friend who has been killed by Israel, or displaced by Israel. A million people are displaced right now in southern Lebanon. Many, many people from Michigan have family members who are suffering. That suffering is reverberating across Southeast Michigan, and that is not being acknowledged by McMorrow or centrist Democrats or establishment Democrats.

RM: How much impact will this actually have on the Democratic Primary?

TP: One of the one of the folks I spoke with for the story was Abed Ayoub, who’s the spokesperson for the American-Arab Anti-Discrimination Committee (ADC), an Arab American civil rights group in Dearborn.

He said to me: “Look, Republicans are making inroads here. If there’s somebody like McMorrow, if there’s a Democratic candidate who’s not considering us, who’s not thinking about our suffering, who’s telling us to be quiet about Israel, then the same things that happened in 2024 are going to happen again. People are going to vote for a Republican. They’re going to stay home, they’re going to vote third party. So yes, if you want to win in Michigan, you might want to acknowledge this suffering. You might want to acknowledge that this is happening.”

I should stress that everybody I spoke with said some variation the same thing, which is the suffering of both people can be acknowledged at the same time. We don’t have to exclude one or the other.